This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to our winner, Nancy Myers! This holiday season, encourage better behavior around the table with must-have resources on the importance of learning and exercising good manners. One reader will win all of these resources:

Each comment counts as a separate entry—that’s four chances to win! Entries must be received by midnight, November 13, 2015.

The winner will be contacted via email on or around November 16, 2015, and will need to respond within 72 hours to claim his or her prize or another winner will be chosen. This giveaway is in no way affiliated with, administered, or endorsed by Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Winner must be a U.S. resident, 18 years of age or older.

We welcome your comments and suggestions. Share your comments, stories, and ideas below, or contact us. All comments will be approved before posting, and are subject to our comment and privacy policies.

63 Responses to Enter Our Holiday Manners Giveaway!

I will use the above resources to build positive behavior, motivate students, and enhance social skills such as sharing, taking turns, use kind words, be kind, to love and respect others. I will also use the resource to enhance empathy, diversity and inclusion.

Social/Emotional learning is so important and a big part of what our Family Child Care Providers do everyday. These books would be given to FCC Providers to use in their programs that serve low-income, at-risk children.

I would read these with my 7 year old grandson. I have legal custody due to his parent’s inability to care for him, and he is currently in counseling for issues with emotional disturbance and ADHD. He LOVES to read, and I often can see the relief in his body when he discovers characters in stories who also are struggling with learning social skills and gaining emotional maturity.

The non-profit agency I work for runs an evidenced based prevention program in 6 schools in our county. These books would be a wonderful addition to our current curriculum. The kindergarten, first and second graders love when we read to them and follow it with an interactive activity. The books would be a natural fit for our program.

I work with children in the child welfare system and make home visits – this would be a good way to enjoy reading time together, assess their reading ability and have them learn something at the same time. In addition, my sister is a second grade teacher and I could share the books with her to educate her students.

I work with many teachers and would love to share these resources with them. Additionally, my niece is a 3rd grade teacher in a Catholic school that emphasizes character building, some of these books would work great in her classroom as a resource as well. Your materials are always so helpful!

I would love to use these books and cards for my kiddos at my school. I am a school social worker and a lot of the time I have to pay for my own materials that I use with my kids. They would absolutely benefit from these materials as they struggle with these concepts so often. Thank you!!!

I find your resources invaluable in my work as a parent, early childhood interventionist and speech-language pathologist. Many of the children I teach have autism, ADHD and/or challenging behaviors. These would come in very handy as part of units I plan around manners, feelings, friendship and kindness. I love the fact that many of the books I have used in the past, contain suggested follow-up activities for parents. Thus, I can lend these to families for carryover at home and out in the community.

I have several of your books and share with my colleagues including teachers and our school counselor. My students love them and learn a great deal from them. Should I win this set, I would love to use them in my kindergarten class and again share them with the staff at our Charter School. Thank you!
Kathy Duplessis
White Pine Charter School

I am the Program Specialist for the whole county, and we provide a lending library for staff, families and community agencies. These books on manners as resources would be useful for whole classes both SPED and Gen ED students, as well as working with small groups and one on one with many of our younger students, not only during the holidays but throughout the year.

This great little library would be so very helpful for teaching guidance lessons, working with groups and for individual counseling. Thanks for offering this! Claudia Horner, Countryside School, Mt, Laurel , NJ

These books would go to one of two groups:
– pediatric OT clinic at a Military Medical Center that works with children with autism;
– Title I school that work with socioeconomically disadvantaged immigrant children.

I have purchased some of these books and just love them!! I am a counselor between two schools and would love to share these with the students and classrooms in which I work. We have 360 students at one school and over 500 in the other. I would love to share this with the staff at both schools!! Thank you – BarBara – School Counselor

I would utilize these dynamic resources with classroom guidance lessons, individual requests and with special education students that I work with weekly in small groups. These small groups focus on social skills so these resources would be an excellent addition to the curriculum. As with many districts across our state and the nation, we have faced budget cuts which make purchasing resources such as these difficult. These valuable books would be greatly used with our students.

I am a homevisitor for our Early Head Start program. I go into families’ homes each week and serve families prenatally through age 3. These books would help me help parents/caregivers in so many ways: to teach, to model, and to present to their children the benefits of manners and courtesy.

I teach parenting classes for foster parents in our county. I would love to teach a class helping those parents teach the children in their home basic manners. This is a great idea!! I use your materials for many of the classes I teach so I know these would be terrific also! Thanks for the idea.

These books will make a great addition to my boys club. Every meeting we focus on something that every boy needs to know or to work on, Obviously manners are a big part of our lessons and will continue to be a part because boys can never have too many manners. : )

I teach a moderate to severe classroom for students with Autism. The books “Noses are Not For Picking” dramatically affected the way my students use this social skill. From this book, my students now will get a tissue and immediately wash their hands instead of digging in their nose all day. These book series offer a great way to introduce social skills to my students in a way that is visual and they understand. These books would help me teach social skills to my students and allow them a visual way to practice each skill set.

I started getting this series for my 3 year old daughter and they were great social stories for her. So I purchased several books for my Autism class. These books have proven to be effective social stories that my Autism students understand. We use the books I already have very frequently and they are now falling apart. With this set I could replace one of the books and add more social stories to our library. These books would be a much needed addition to my classroom.

I am a school counselor at a school of 700 students grades K-8. I teach manners every school year to our students during our Guidance classes–and I’m always looking for additional resources. I would really appreciate the items you have selected for the give-a-way–they included issues that often come up with our students.

I teach sixth grade in Middle School and still find that many students do not have basic manners such as please and thank you instilled in them. I find it interesting that my students from the most disadvantaged home do have the best manners. I would use these resources in our class meetings on an “as needed” basis, plus make them available to my 7 other colleagues who also teach sixth grade in my building.

These books on manners would be a valuable addition to our library collection for a school that serves Pre-K students through Grade 8. Both the librarian and the classroom teachers would welcome the books to use in generating discussion on good manners, behavior, and friendship at school, at home, and in the greater community.

Fantastic books to use with children.
As an Elementary School Social Worker, I’m always looking for materials to use with young children. Engaging picture books are an ideal way to teach a skill. Thank you Free Spirit for having such great titles in your catalog!

These resources would be excellent additions to the children’s libraries of the parents I teach Parenting 101 to in four quarterly eight lesson series, and for the Whole Parent series I provide for the local Family Resource Center, I am already using “Hands Are Not for Hitting”, “Teeth Are Not for Biting”, and “Tails Are Not for Pulling”. I know they would appreciate the opportunity to receive these also.
Sallie Hooker

These books would be a wonderful addition for our AmeriCorps members who are in preschool classrooms building social and emotion regulation skills. It’s a perfect match and I would share them with the team and we would brainstorm on how to use them effectively in our classrooms. We target children in Head Starts and other early childhood programs serving families with limited means, managing high-stress households and disruption in their lives due to poverty, mental illness, and the whole gambit of challenges the cycle of poverty can imbed in the lives of the children living with high stress. And as we all know, stress impacts the developing brain, health and well-being. We want to share the many tools and strategies available and teach these beautiful children new ways of thinking and acting so they can become confident, excited and affirmed Kindergarten students who love to learn and are curious, empathic and socially competent. Thanks for the chance to brighten and expand our ability to teach these critical life EQ skills early in our AmeriCorps LEAP (learning early achieves potential) Initiative!

I would utilize these resources with my K-5 population, where I am a School Social Worker for 2 Elementary buildings. I meet with kids in Pos+ Behavior Groups and Social SKills Training as well as, presenting in the Elementary Classrooms.

I serve Kindergarten and 1st grade students with several disabilities including autism and emotional disturbance. These books really help us talk about different social situations they encounter both at school and at home. They are easy to read and the dialogue that comes from reading them is incredible. I look forward to sharing them with many of my general education colleagues as well.

As an elementary school counselor with 4 year olds through 5th graders I would love
to add this set to our guidance library! I would use the younger books in classroom lessons-
especially the Be KInd and Polite book- I love that series for 4K and Kindergarten! Zach Apologies would fit well into a lesson I do for 3rd and 4th grades on what a real apology looks like.I would use some of the other books -like Dude that’s Rude- with my older students in individual counseling.Sometimes those topics feel embarrassing to them and they would rather gain some skills in an individual setting. Thanks for the quality materials you provide!